


fate is a gift

by ships_to_sail



Category: Schitt's Creek
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Character Death, Episode: s04e02 Pregnancy Test, Episode: s04e07 The Barbecue, Episode: s05e13 The Hike, Grief/Mourning, M/M, Vignette, could should did
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-07
Updated: 2020-08-08
Packaged: 2021-03-06 06:21:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,998
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25758748
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ships_to_sail/pseuds/ships_to_sail
Summary: Moments in Schitt's Creek as the could have happened, as they should've happened, and as they did happen.
Relationships: Patrick Brewer/David Rose
Comments: 24
Kudos: 99





	1. the truth is rarely pure and never simple

**Author's Note:**

> A collection of vignettes, un-beta'd and written mostly when I'm trying to distract myself from other things I should probably be writing instead. As a fun little exercise, all of these will follow the same format and be under a thousand words, because why not!

**_It could have happened like this..._ **

“Well, anyone with a glass, please raise them. To relationships, old and new.” Johnny shoots them both a look, and Patrick feels blood fill the edges of his ears, now the color of cherry blossoms. David bites the inside of his cheek to keep from grinning and gravity rearranges itself in the space between Patrick’s vertebrae, the gaps between sparking synapses. 

“Um, thanks for waiting,” Alexis comes around the corner, a snap in her voice as the leather fringe of her purse bounces around her knees. “I was, like. With a guest.” She shoots a look at Stevie, who rolls her eyes and takes an obnoxious bite of burger as Alexis scoots in next to David.

“What guest,” David asks with a dismissive shake of his head. “We never get guests.”

“Patently untrue, son,” his father says at the same time Alexis shrugs her shoulders and says, “some pretty little red-headed girl in town chasing her ex.” She pops a cherry tomato into her mouth and a drop of juice flies from between her teeth and lands on the edge of David’s sleeve. He rolls his eyes and makes a disgusted sound and Patrick feels the laughter buzzing behind his teeth before he makes the sound a living thing, bubbles it into the space over the table like champagne bubbles.

The sound is a cover heavy enough to disguise the flip of his stomach — a rogue red-head, an ex pursued, dozens of text messages ignored. He leans into the laugher and spends the rest of the evening laughing with Stevie, teasing Alexis, running the edge of his boot up the inside ankle of David’s high-tops and watching as David’s breath catches in his chest.

The red-head never comes up again, and no one ever knows better. Patrick deletes the text messages, and decides to let some skeletons stay buried, and as clean as his closet one day becomes, everybody dies with secrets. 

**_It should have happened like this…_ **

“I just didn’t expect to be graced by the presence of _two_ of your exes tonight.”

“Yeah, funny thing, neither did I! So…” David trails off and leans in almost imperceptibly towards Patrick, their bodies already pulling together like magnets. 

Patrick’s chin dips down in a knowing fondness. “But…”

“Mm-hmm?”

“Given that we only have the apartment for one night, maybe it’s best if we...lock that box back up for now?”

“Mm-hmm. I think that’s a good idea,” David’s looking at him like he’s going to eat him alive, knowing smile dancing on his face. Patrick wants to be a three-course meal, wants to lay himself out for David to consume in the kind of privacy they’ve never really had before. Their lips meet and Patrick can feel the bed shift underneath him, but it’s because David is pulling away and they aren’t kissing and why aren’t they kissing and —

“You know what, we didn’t even get into your history…”

And Patrick can’t kiss David because his mouth tastes like ash and he knew they’d have to have this conversation but he doesn’t know how to have it and doesn’t know how much truth he owes to David right now, besides. He scoffs and rolls his eyes and forces a calm levity into his voice. “Not much to know about _her_ ,” he emphasizes the pronoun and sees understanding in David’s eyes, coupled with fear so he keeps talking, “just the one ex-fianceé, extreme emphasis on the _ex_.”

David’s voice is hoarse. “Fianceé?” Patrick nods, and David’s hands are suddenly twisting between them. Patrick reaches out and steadies them both with the flat of his palm. 

“ _Ex_ finaceé, remember?”

“ _Extreme_ emphasis on the ex?” Patrick nods and lifts David’s hands to his lips. 

“The extremest.”

David laughs. “That’s not a word.” 

Patrick hums, but his eyes catch David’s and don’t let go. “So. That’s the history.”

David catches his lip between his teeth and nods once, then again, a third time more firmly, and then his arms are around Patrick’s neck, his lips on the soft stretch of skin underneath his ear. “Consider both boxes locked, then.” 

Patrick sighs his assent into David’s mouth with a thank you. They spend the night locking boxes and breaking each other open. 

**_It did happen like this…_ **

“David, I’ve spent most of my life not knowing what right was supposed to feel like, and then I met you. And everything changed” Patrick’s eyes are the loudest they’ve ever been but David can’t hear them over the blood pounding in his ears. He presses his eyes together but it doesn’t keep out the sincerity in Patrick’s voice, threatening to burrow it’s way under David’s walls when he continues: “you make me feel right, David.”

And he’ll hate himself later for rolling his eyes, but in that moment the bitterness of a deep and universal knowing fills him: this is how it will always be for him. He’d dared to close his eyes and imagine — white flowers, a skirted tux, Patrick’s earnest smile waiting for him, forever. “That is quite possibly the most beautiful thing I’ve ever heard anyone say. Outside the _Downton Christmas Special.”_

“It’s the truth.”

“I know it is. It’s just that _my_ truth is that I am damaged goods, and this has really messed things up for me. And I think I’m going to need some time with it.”

David can see Patrick’s heart breaks in real-time, but he is eternally _good_ , so he whispers “okay” and steps away from David, giving David space, along with time. 

And he doesn’t know, then, that it will take time. Time, and a bracelet; a song, a mountain, and a thousand tiny disagreements. He doesn’t know that he’ll get David back when he lets him go, but he doesn’t force and doesn’t argue and doesn’t hold David’s feelings against him. He just whispers an “okay” and steps away.

And that, more than anything, is what brings David back. 


	2. in your lifetime and during your days

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is a sad one, friends. Mind your tags and in case you missed it: this is the could/should/did of Johnny's 'heart attack' and is tagged for non-graphic, off-the-page major character death. This is a story about grief in a thousand words, so please take care of yourselves <3

**_It could have happened like this..._ **

“David. You have to say something. Please.” Patrick rubs his back and he can feel David prepare to speak, can feel the intake of breath that means words, means the production of sound, but there is nothing. His shoulders begin to vibrate, to shake, and then David is throwing Patrick off him and screaming into the pillow underneath him until he can taste copper in the back of his mouth.

None of this is fair. It’s so far beyond fair David can’t see fair with the fucking Hubble telescope. 

He doesn’t realize he’s saying all of this out loud until he feels Patrick’s palm, warm and heavy across his back, voice low and steady as he repeats, “of course it’s not fair” over and over until it becomes a prayer.

David feels himself fill with something darker and uglier than he’d ever thought possible. His sister is in the bathroom, curling her hair so she has something to do to keep her hands from shaking, and his mother hasn’t come out of the closet since it happened. He finds the plates he leaves empty of their toast slices, the glasses of water drained, so he knows she’s alive.

As alive as any of them can be now. 

The weight of lost years slams into David again like a sucker-punch, a fierce fist he doesn’t see coming until it’s digging into the soft space under his ribcage where Patrick once put his hand and told David he could feel his big ole’ heart. A heart that feels four sizes too small because he spent more years of his life resentful and angry with his dad than he did in a family that made him happy, made them all better versions of themselves. 

“We need to leave soon if we’re going to make it to Beth Torah on time,” Patrick says, and a flash of anger, white-hot and sharp, flares through David from his toes. He grips on to it even as he feels it slice into his guts, clings to a flare of feeling,  _ any  _ feeling, even those furthest from all his better angels. He doesn’t want to be  _ on time,  _ doesn’t think it’s fair that Patrick gets to worry about  _ on time  _ when David’s life has this big giant gaping crack in it, a crack that’s spreading and pulling him down into it until his fingers are numb and he’s awake for days until his body gives up on him and the dark pillows his head with a soft, numbing distance. 

“I’m not going,” he hisses at Patrick, who immediately stops touching David’s back. There’s no resentment in the move; Patrick knows that too much input will run David’s ragged nerves through the shredder.

“David,” Patrick says, and he tries to keep admonishment from his voice, but Patrick is a good person, even during the moments David most wishes he weren’t.

“Don’t ‘David’ me,” he almost shouts. There’s a flare of anger in Patrick’s eyes and David wants to push at that flare, poke it, fan it, feed it all his loss and pain until it flames into something as destructive and all-consuming as the grief gnawing at the bottom of his stomach. 

But then the flare recedes, cools into compassion, comfort, an understanding David doesn’t think he deserves. It breaks him. 

He collapses into Patrick and doesn’t remember getting to the service. Somehow, Patrick gets them there. He, and Alexis, and even Moira, her eyes rimmed in a streaky black so thick David wonders if the color’s been branded into her skin. 

Patrick holds the Rose’s world together that day, and it’s not until months later that David realizes he never gave Patrick the chance to break apart himself. 

**_It should have happened like this…_ **

Stevie turns her face into the corner and presses a fist to her lips, while David folds his height into something small, fragile, shrunken enough he’s able to fit under Patrick’s arm, able to feel the small, warm seep of tears into his hair. There’s silence around them that seems deafening after the slow, thin breaths that tapered off into something deeper than absence. All of them cry, but none of them make noise. Alexis presses a kiss to the back of Moira’s hand, stands from where she’s sitting between Moira and Johnny, walks to David, and drapes herself over him like a safety blanket.

More than ever now, they only have each other. All four of the Rose children, flowers without stems in a garden that will forever be a little darker. Life saw fit to join Moira and Johnny Rose with a force few were able to understand; of course Death had little choice but to take both of them with the same intensity, the same duality, together forever. Since when has a silly thing like death ever altered forever?

**_It did happen like this…_ **

“I’m sure he probably just roped them into one of his long-winded stories...or he could be on the table with a triple by-pass.” 

“Mr. Rose is gonna be fine. He has to be.” Stevie picks at an invisible something on the knee of her jeans and feels herself clawing at a certainty she does not feel. "I mean. I can’t be left alone with this hotel. I don’t do math.”

She’s met every other tragedy in her life with that dry sardonic wit, why stop now. But a lump of bile rises in her throat when the doctor comes through the door. 

“Hey folks, I have an update on Mr. Rose’s condition for you. We did an endoscopy and found out it was, in fact, severe heartburn. We gave him an antacid, a strong one, and he’s doing just fine.”

Stevie feels adrenaline flood her system, every last feeling she held at bay assaulting her defenses until she feels useless against the wetness along her lower lashes. Mr. Rose is going to live a million more years. 

She knows it. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> title taken from the [Mourner's Kaddish](https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/text-of-the-mourners-kaddish/).

**Author's Note:**

> title from Dante Alighieri, sort of


End file.
